The Eve of Battle

well, it's 1 a.m. and I should be in bed. I spent most of today pouring over my syllabi and making major revisions - like "tweaking the whole damn grading scheme" kind of revisions. Then I took a step back and realized that the new-improved syllabi were seething with left over angst and bitterness from my students issues last year...

so I re-wrote them... again.

Well, not completely, but I reduced the hostility of them considerably by taking the preachy and threatening paragraphs and breaking them into simple, starightforward bullet points.

Mission accomplished - cover your ass from all possible directions. Whatever you give them on day one in writing may be the asbestos that keeps the parental dragon-fire from roasting your sorry hide six months from now. You teachers know what I mean.

Anyway - I'm pretty proud of myself - it's the most intensive syllabi revision in years - and yes all six classes had to be tweaked differently. Tomorrow I get to dive back in and find the typos, contradictions and other confusing errors.

My enthusiasm is a little short-lived, however. Even as I sit here, I feel the fear creeping up on me: Today we got our teaching assignments in the mail, and looking at the sheet I think the counseling office/administrative team may have thrown my program into a pickle - a mess that, believe it or not, may surpass anything Principal Palpatine would have done. Based on the info I see, I've got sections filled with kids assigned to the wrong period and - what the hell is the jazz class doing mixed in with the concert band class?

I'm wondering if someone may have finally caught and "fixed" the glitch in the music department - the one where it looks like I'm teaching six classes. And I am - kind of... on paper - but the hours work out to... well, let's just say that it's complicated, and to be safe I've been lying low for about.. oh.. a decade... hoping that no one would notice.

The funny thing is - Palpatine did notice... but straightening it out probably would have dumped the jazz program, and at the time her favorite student was enrolled in it so... yeah she let me slide on that one.

Tomorrow I have to go in and figure out what my schedule I really is - and whether or not my program is intact. If I'm lucky, The biggest mess I'll have to sort out is figuring out which 7th grader goes into beginning band and which ones can go straight into concert band. (which is.. maybe a couple days on the phone). If I'm not lucky... I don't want to think about it...